quotes tagged with 'demeanor'

At one point, Terman and heis fieldworkers go and visit everyone from the A and C groups and rate their personalities and manner. What they found is everything you would expect to find if you were comparing chidren raised in an atmosphere of natural growth. The As were juded to be much more alert, poised, attractive, and well dressed. In fact, the scores on those four dimensions are so diffrent as to make you think you are looking at two different species of humans. You aren't, of course. You're simply seeing the difference between those schooled by their families to present their best face to the world, and those denied that expereince.

The Terman results are deeply distressing. Let's not forget how highly gifted the C group was. Ifyou had met them at five or six year of age, you would have been overwhelmed by their curiosity and mental agility and sparkle. They were true outliers. The plain truth of the Terman study, however, is that in the end almost none of the genius children from the lowest social and economic class ended up making a name for themselves.

What did the Cs lack, though? Not something expensive or impossible to find; not something encoded in DNA or hardwired into the circuits of their brains. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we'd only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world.